Noah Webster Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.

Noah Webster
When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.

Noah Webster
All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Noah Webster
No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people.

Noah Webster
The ecclesiastical establishments of Europe, which serve to support tyrannical governments, are not the Christian religion, but abuses and corruptions of it. The religion of Christ and his apostles, in it primitive simplicity and purity, unencumbered with the trappings of power and the pomp of ceremonies, is the surest basis of a republican government.

Noah Webster
The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truth by which men are to be guided in government as well as in all social transactions.

Noah Webster
Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.

Noah Webster
Treason is the highest crime of a civil nature of which a man can be guilty.

Noah Webster
Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country.

Noah Webster
The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws... The religion which has introduced civil liberty is the religion of Christ and his Apostles... This is genuine Christianity and to this we owe our free constitutions of government.

Noah Webster
Nothing has a greater tendency to lessen the reverence which mankind ought to have for the Supreme Being, than a careless repetition of his name upon every trifling occasion.... To prevent this profanation, such passages are selected from scripture, as contain some important precepts of morality and religion, in which that sacred name is seldom mentioned. Let sacred things be appropriated to sacred purposes.

Noah Webster
To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.

Noah Webster
An immense effect may be produced by small powers wisely and steadily directed.

Noah Webster
Whenever a man is known to seek promotion by intrigue, by temporizing, or by resorting to the haunts of vulgarity and vice for support, it may be inferred, with moral certainty, that he is not a man of real respectability, nor is he entitled to public confidence.

Noah Webster
When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers just men who will rule in the fear of God. The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty.

Noah Webster
The Moral Law is summarily contained in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments; written by the finger of God on two tablets of stone, and delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Noah Webster
As a general rule, it may be affirmed that the man who never intrigues for office may be most safely entrusted with office...Such a man cannot desire promotion unless he received it from the respectable part of the community, for he considers no other promotion to be honorable.

Noah Webster
Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.

Noah Webster
Where will you find any code of laws among civilized men in which the commands and prohibitions are not founded on Christian principles? I need not specify the prohibition of murder, robbery, theft, trespass.

Noah Webster
It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.

Noah Webster
The education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. [I]t is much easier to introduce and establish an effectual system... than to correct by penal statutes the ill effects of a bad system.... The education of youth... lays the foundations on which both law and gospel rest for success.

Noah Webster
The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.

Noah Webster
The duties of men are summarily comprised in the Ten Commandments, consisting of two tables; one comprehending the duties which we owe immediately to God-the other, the duties we owe to our fellow men.

Noah Webster
The American states have gone far in assisting the progress of truth; but they have stopped short of perfection. They ought to have given every honest citizen an equal right to enjoy his religion and an equal title to all civil emoluments, without obliging him to tell his religion. Every interference of the civil power in regulating opinion, is an impious attempt to take the business of the Deity out of his own hands; and every preference given to any religious denomination, is so far slavery and bigotry.

Noah Webster
The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society; the best book for regulating the temporal [secular] concerns of men.

Noah Webster
The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rime or to Great Britain; Boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.

Noah Webster
Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.

Noah Webster
Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of her honor.

Noah Webster
The heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

Noah Webster
In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate-look to his character.

Noah Webster